Themes
Two of the film's central themes – the culture of entertainment production and the writing process – are intertwined and relate specifically to the self-referential nature of the work (as well as the work within the work). It is a movie about a man who writes a movie based on a play, and at the centre of Barton's entire opus is Barton himself. The dialogue in his play Bare Ruined Choirs (also the first lines of the film, some of which are repeated at the end of the film as lines in Barton's screenplay The Burlyman) give us a glimpse into Barton's self-descriptive art. The mother in the play is named "Lil", which is later revealed to be the name of Barton's own mother. In the play, "The Kid" (a representation of Barton himself) refers to his home "six flights up" – the same floor where Barton resides at the Hotel Earle. Moreover, the characters' writing processes in Barton Fink reflect important differences between the culture of entertainment production in New York's Broadway district and Hollywood.
Read more about this topic: Barton Fink
Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
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